Reddit Ads for B2B tech: an honest assessment

Reddit Ads is the channel B2B tech marketers ask us about most often and run least often. Every quarter someone in the industry posts a thread on LinkedIn claiming Reddit is the next great B2B channel, the comments fill with people saying they tried it and it produced nothing, and the pattern repeats. The truth, as usual, is more boring than either narrative.

We have run Reddit Ads for several B2B tech clients over the past two years, with results ranging from “genuinely valuable awareness channel” to “complete waste of £4,000”. Below is an honest read on when the channel works, when it does not and what changes when AI search starts pulling Reddit content into citation answers.

What Reddit actually offers a B2B advertiser

Reddit’s targeting is structurally different to LinkedIn or Google. You cannot target by job title, company size or seniority. You can target by subreddit, by interest category and by keyword (recent search and post engagement). The audiences are loose by B2B standards, but they have one important property: they are self-selected by topic interest in a way that LinkedIn audiences are not.

Someone subscribing to r/sysadmin, r/msp, r/cybersecurity, r/devops or r/sre is signalling a real, voluntary interest in the topic. They are not there because their job title says so. They are there because they care, often outside of work hours, often more deeply than the average LinkedIn audience does.

This produces a particular kind of audience: technical practitioners, often more senior or more specialist than their LinkedIn profile suggests, often the people who actually decide which tools the team uses even when they do not hold the budget. For some B2B tech categories, this audience is gold. For others, it is irrelevant.

Where Reddit Ads can work

We have seen Reddit produce meaningful pipeline for three clear categories.

Developer tools and infrastructure

Anything that touches developers or DevOps teams. Observability, CI/CD, security scanning, infrastructure-as-code, API tools, internal developer platforms. These audiences live on Reddit. They are sceptical of marketing copy, suspicious of demos and immune to LinkedIn thought leadership posts. They will, however, click on a Reddit ad that names a real technical problem, links to a useful blog post or shows a screenshot of an actual product feature.

Cybersecurity tooling for practitioners

Tooling that targets the SOC analyst, the security engineer or the IR responder, as opposed to the CISO. The CISO buys, but the practitioner influences and the practitioner is on Reddit. Cybersecurity vendors selling EDR, SIEM, threat intel or forensic tools have run profitable Reddit campaigns when the creative speaks practitioner language rather than executive language.

Niche SaaS where the buyer is also the user

Vertical SaaS where the person evaluating the tool is also the daily user, particularly in technical fields. We have seen this work for analytics, monitoring SaaS and parts of the finance-tech stack where the user is an engineer rather than an executive.

Where Reddit Ads do not work

Three categories where we usually advise clients to skip the channel.

First, traditional managed services and IT support. The buyer is an IT manager or operations director, often time-poor and not on Reddit professionally. We have run Reddit campaigns for MSPs and the results have consistently been worse than the same budget on the Google Ads MSP geo playbook approach.

Second, ERP and big-platform consultancies. The buyers (CFOs, COOs, transformation directors) are not on Reddit in any meaningful capacity.

Third, anything requiring named-account targeting. ABM is structurally impossible on Reddit. If your strategy is “reach these 200 accounts”, LinkedIn Conversation Ads or programmatic ABM through DV360 or The Trade Desk is the right channel. The full account-based picture is in account-based ads on LinkedIn.

Creative that works on Reddit

Reddit has the most sceptical user base of any major paid channel. Creative that works on LinkedIn (“transform your IT estate”) gets eviscerated in the comments and tanks the campaign. Creative that works on Reddit has three qualities.

It is honest about what the product does and what it does not. Vague claims attract negative comments, which Reddit does not let you delete (within reason). Specific, true claims attract genuine questions.

It links to genuinely useful content, not gated lead-gen forms. A Reddit user clicking a “download the buyer’s guide” gated form is reaching for the back button. The same user clicking through to a substantial, ungated technical post will read it, often share it and sometimes follow up later.

It uses a tone that does not sound like marketing. The writing should match the subreddit. r/sysadmin readers are different to r/cybersecurity readers, and both are different to the r/devops crowd. Generic creative across multiple subreddits underperforms.

This shapes the offer. We typically run Reddit campaigns to ungated content first, retargeting on the website to convert later. The retargeting flow follows the retargeting tech buyers framework.

Targeting: subreddits, keywords and interests

Reddit’s targeting is layered. We tend to run campaigns with three components.

Subreddit targeting: the most direct, and the most variable in quality. Some subreddits are genuinely useful (r/sysadmin, r/msp, r/devops, r/cybersecurity, r/dataengineering). Others are too broad or too noisy (r/technology, r/programming) and produce poor lead quality.

Keyword targeting: matching ads to recent post and comment activity. This works well for product-led campaigns where users are searching for solutions to specific problems.

Interest category targeting: Reddit’s broader interest groupings. Useful as a back-stop, but the targeting is loose and we tend to layer it with subreddit or keyword filters.

Geographic targeting works at the country level. Sub-country targeting is limited, which is one reason Reddit underperforms for region-specific UK MSP campaigns.

Costs and benchmarks

Reddit CPMs in 2026 typically run £8 to £25 for the audiences we work with, well below LinkedIn but above broad-reach social. Click-through rates on technical creative tend to land between 0.4 and 1.2 per cent, which is healthy for a feed-based channel. Cost per click ranges from £0.80 to £4 depending on subreddit competitiveness.

Cost per qualified lead is the harder number, because Reddit’s lead-gen forms produce noisier data than LinkedIn’s. We tend to push traffic to website forms (with appropriate consent and tracking) rather than Reddit’s native lead form. Cost per SQL on the campaigns where Reddit works has run in the £400 to £1,200 range, comparable to LinkedIn for the same audiences when the channel fit is genuine.

A minimum monthly budget of around £3,000 to £5,000 is realistic for testing seriously. Below that, the data is too thin to draw conclusions either way.

The AI search side effect

Reddit content is now heavily cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot answers. This changes the calculus around Reddit beyond paid. Brands that show up in Reddit threads (organically, helpfully, not through obvious astroturfing) tend to surface in AI answers later. Our Reddit in AI search piece covers the organic side, and the practical takeaway is that Reddit ads can build the brand familiarity that supports the organic Reddit presence in turn.

This is not a reason to run Reddit ads on its own. It is a reason to take Reddit seriously as a channel where paid and organic reinforce each other, in a way that has become true for fewer channels than people pretend.

Tracking and attribution

Reddit’s pixel and conversion tracking are workable but not as mature as Google or LinkedIn. The match rate on Reddit conversion tracking is meaningfully worse than Meta or LinkedIn’s, partly because Reddit users skew towards privacy tools and partly because the platform itself has been slower to invest in API-side conversions.

We treat Reddit-attributed conversions as directional rather than authoritative, and we lean heavily on view-through analysis and on CRM-side stitching for the real read. The pipeline-tracking framework we use for LinkedIn applies broadly, with the Reddit-specific caveat that the click-side data is noisier.

A practical test

For the categories where Reddit might fit, we usually recommend a 12-week test with three creatives, two to four subreddits and a clear pre-defined exit criterion. If cost per SQL beats LinkedIn for the same audience, scale. If it lands in the same ballpark, hold steady at a lower budget. If it is meaningfully worse, accept the result and move the budget back.

Most of the noise online about Reddit Ads either being amazing or terrible comes from people who skipped the test step and chose a vibe instead. If you’d like a second opinion on attribution or budget split, drop us a line. The wider context sits on our paid media service page.